I think here's where everyone in this discussion has gone wrong. The original goal of the patent law has always been to foster innovation by encouraging inventors to publish the gist of their inventions so that other inventions could be built on those.
To achieve that the patent law was devised, giving inventors some extra rights to exclusively reap the benefits of their invention for a limited period of time in exchange that they share their inventions with the rest of the world. Hence - the limited monopoly on the invention is not the intent of the patent law as such. Rather it is there solely to encourage a free exchange of ideas to foster incremental and rapid innovation, which can not be possible in an environment where everyone keeps their innovative ideas to themselves, for all the best and most innovative ideas build inevitably upon all earlier innovations... Coming from this point of view, I quite strongly oppose the idea of software patents in the form they are being applied today to the market. While I wholeheartedly agree that coming up with an original invention should be rewarded, the time has passed significantly since late 1700's when the patent law was introduced and the flow of information has improved dramatically. Whereas in those times it took years for an idea to travel from one place to another, nowadays, it is almost instantaneous. This means that the patent grant times of 17 years is plain ridiculous in most cases. In software, I would argue, the whole idea of patents is simply outrageously inappropriate -- Remember, I come from the point of view whereby the sole purpose of the patent law is to foster innovation -- and in case of the software, the innovation does not really need any encouragement. For all the software builds on top of ideas and solutions that have been "invented" by someone before us. I have some 15+ years of software development under my now quite sizeable belt and I must admit that during all that time I've hardly had any truly original idea ever occur to me that was not prompted by a snippet of code I saw somewhere else or a working application I had used or seen someone use... That is not to say I have not created anything all by myself or come upon any clever designs, I could be proud of, but all my creations are an amalgamation of all the ideas and solutions I have seen and noticed all around me. I am sure that if I was to be accountable for every line of the code I've written I'd probably not write any lines of code for the fear of stepping on one patented idea and copyrighted idea or another. For all I know, I am infringing someone's IP even now... Besides - the lifespan of a software product is ridiculously small. Five years, is probably the best a single desktop application can hope to stand, and by that time the poor thing is so much behind everything else available on the market, it is hopelessly outdated... Bearing in mind all this plus looking at the practical application of software patents, I can not see any benefit in awarding patents to software "inventions" As to Apple vs. HTC case, I can not see anything else but Apple's "evil" attempt to stifle innovation. Regardless where you stand in the patent law discussion, Apple should not be so feeble a company that they need to resort to such tactics to keep their competitive advantage. They've had the advantage of being the only multi-touch device on the marked for 3 years now ... they should have had their strategy laid out so that by the time other vendors chime in, Apple would have moved on by now to more advanced interactions... On Apr 8, 3:23 pm, Maarten <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't think anyone would dispute the intention of patents: to > protect inventors and offer them a chance to profit from their own, > original ideas. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
